“I keep sailing on in this middle passage. I am sailing into the wind and the dark. But I am doing my best to keep my boat steady and my sails full.”

True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.

Life is like a tennis game. You can’t win without serving.

I spent many, many hours in libraries. Libraries became courts of last resort, as it were.

Wherever I am when you feel sick at heart and weary of life, or when you stumble and fall and don’t know if you can get up again, think of me. I will be watching and smiling and cheering you on.

I take the good with the bad, and I try to face them both with as much calm and dignity as I can muster.

We must reach out our hand in friendship and dignity both to those who would befriend us and those who would be our enemy.

The ideal attitude is to be physically loose and mentally tight.

In America you’re conditioned to regard everything as a contest. You have to make the Ten Best Dressed List, win this, win that. It drives me nuts sometimes. Who cares, for Christ’s sake?

Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome.

Let me put it this way: I think Republicans tend to keep the ball in play, Democrats go for broke.

It’s an abnormal world I live in. I don’t belong anywhere. It’s like I’m floating down the middle. I’m never quite sure where I am.

You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.

Always have the situation under control, even if losing. Never betray an inward sense of defeat.

I know I could never forgive myself if I elected to live without humane purpose, without trying to help the poor and unfortunate, without recognizing that perhaps the purest joy in life comes with trying to help others.

I have always tried to be true to myself, to pick those battles I felt were important. My ultimate responsibility is to myself. I could never be anything else.

We must believe in the power of education. We must respect just laws. We must love ourselves, our old and or young, our women as well as our men.

Do you know my friend that each one of us is a dark mystery, a maze of conflicting passions and desire and aptitudes?

I cannot remember a night so dark as to have hindered the coming day.

On stage, I am in the dark.

I don’t try and be dark, but there are obviously darker emotions that I want to capture sometimes.

I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes, but I laugh, and eat well, and grow strong.

Crazy isn’t being broken, or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me, amplified.

As sure as God made black and white, what’s done in the dark will be brought to the light.

At two o’clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen, You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun. And the trees in the Shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten, And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.